A fascinating book, giving an insight into an almost unimaginable life on London's streets (mainly) in the 19th century. The characters really come alive in spite of their awful situation, and we see them as independent and proud people rather then merely objects of pity. The pages of references testify to the author's copious research but the writing style is never dry or unapproachable. I would thoroughly recommend this book.

A rich tapestry of the fascinating under current of society with lots of compelling detail. I thoroughly enjoyed learning some lesser known facts about living in these times and the perils and ease of slipping to the wrong side of the law and the desperate circumstances that could lead to this.
Some of the characters bring to life the fictional ones we have brushed with via Charles Dickens’ and fill in layers of detail and backstory about the real life peoples they might’ve been based around.
The stories were really emotive and all too easy to empathise with and it is good to hear their side of things instead of always the written accounts of the wealthy, you feel as if someone’s truly speaking up on their behalf to explain their provocations and struggles.
A definite recommend from me.

This book was based on an interesting concept and had the basis to be really good but unfortunately it just wasn’t for me and failed to hold my attention.

A compelling read that really allowed the reader to see how it was for the poor in 19th century Britain. The book was well written and incredibly well researched whilst still being compulsively readable which isnt always easy with non fiction. Fullof vivid descriptions and rich imagery. Definitely worth a read.

My thanks to the publishers for an advanced copy of this fascinating book for review. It is a gripping and visceral read on what it was really like to live and make a living on London’s streets in the century between the Napoleonic and Crimean wars. Unlike the voyeuristic, sometimes frankly pornographic, imperial liberals who observed, categorised and passed moral judgement on the ordinary and extraordinary people struggling to live on the streets of the capital, the author goes to considerable trouble to enable as many as possible to tell us about their world and what matters to them in their own words.

Beginning with Mary Ann Donovan’s eloquent defiance in court and the slum dweller’s articulate rage about how journalists describe his world, we meet a range of people who just do not conform to the stereotypes categorised by experts like Henry Mayhew and Thomas Barnardo. There are Margaret Cochran, crossing sweeper, lollipop lady and lifeguard and Bridget, the newspaper seller. There is Sarah Tanner, whose resolute rise from maid servant to affluent courtesan enables her to retire and become a successful coffee shop proprietor. There are busking hymn singers and ballad singers plying their song sheets. There is Joseph Johnson, a disabled black merchant seaman, who performs a Jonkanoo rendition of ‘the storm’ on crutches with the Nelson ship on his head. There are the fugitive slave girls of Kentucky. There is double amputee Edward Albert, who writes and gets published a pamphlet about his ordeal when he was a pastry chef with frostbite on board ship. There are kidnappers and there are pick pockets. And this is without mentioning the most famous of those who were born on the street. People like Edmund Kean, maybe the best of Shakespearean actors, and William ‘Billie’ Waters, fiddler extraordinaire.

For all these, and many more, life on the street is far, far better than life in an institution. They all prize their liberty in an age of arbitrary law and private order enforcement. Institutions set up on the face of it to help are monsters of persecution. The law succeeds in separating Eliza from her blind, black partner, Mohamet Abraham, in a story of institutional racism which repeats to the present day. If it could, the law would have persecuted a couple, when the man turns out to be a woman. The mendacity of the poisonous Mendicity Society knows no boundaries. The poor are always blamed for their plight in any age, but this book shows some everyday and some heroic resistance. These people are not victims.

Do read this book. It’s tremendous.

An interesting, immensely readable, book with a strong narrative voice, and a firm sense of story. I enjoyed reading it a lot, and found both the age based structure, and variety of characters, to work well in creating a very clear sense of street London during this time. The later chapters in particular gave me a very strong reminder of the London chapters in Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, albeit a century apart.

The author's voice is very clear throughout, which is probably quite a personal preference, but one that was effective for me. In part this was because so much of the sources relied on to describe the people featured in the book were sources that simultaneously claimed their inherent impartiality while judging and patronising their subjects. Jensen's refusal to pretend impartiality is much more refreshingly honest in this context.

One general topic that I would have liked to have seen covered a bit more was of the relationships between the people who lived on and around the streets- what were the norms and realities as compared to the laws and societal norms in higher classes. There were a few elements mentioned which showed differences here, such as the (seemingly) trans man and the contrast between the apparent ease and recognition in his relationship and the censorship (and confusion!) of the authorities, and then the discussion of mixed race relationships that were accepted more by the lower classes, and I would have liked to have delved more into this.

Relatedly I would have liked more about queerness in general, and more exploration of the topic of gender roles as well. For example the chapter on sex workers looked solely at female prostitution gor example, and I would have been interested in seeing the comparative lives and treatment of male sex workers too.

Overall this was an excellent book that was really readable, full of interesting detail and sought to portray a wide and diverse breadth of London life in the period.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC

Overall, this book is social history as I like it, well-written, individual-driven, striving to provide the subjects’ own narrative whenever possible. The book sits somewhere in between of popularizing and academic text and I think general public will find this book accessible, engaging and eye-opening, and academics will find it a very useful companion to more data-oriented monographies.

I have several issues with the book, some minor, some not:

There are formatting issues in the ARC that hopefully will be corrected in the finished eBook.

The author’s voice is very distinct, maybe too forceful in making his point. It is clear who the villain is and letting the people, events and facts speaking for themselves would have had stronger impact. I would also appreciate at least brief factual commentary to frame the personal stories and to provide context.

The chapter division more or less follows the age groups from childhood to old age and it mostly works well. However, the decision to separate children and young adults to the chapters The Boy and The Girl which do not follow the same age groups seems arbitrary and achieves the exact opposite to what the author strives to do in the chapter on the girls in the streets. He distances himself from the male-gaze-heavy period reports but by focusing separately on girls of the age when they are most vulnerable to male advances and introducing the issue of prostitution in relation to women only, he contributes to the stereotypes. Why isn’t male prostitution mentioned?

There are also no queer people, save for a single transgender man, mentioned in the book. Given how vocal the book is on issues of social injustice, racism, and injustice towards women, it’s rather surprising.

Late 18th - to late 19th century London - from beggars and thieves, to musicians and missionaries, porters and hawkers to sex workers and street criers, author Oskar Jensen brings a wealth of original research and first-hand accounts and testimonies to tell their stories in their own words.

These are some of the voices that answer back. The ones that normally leave no trace behind - although some will have been named in dreaded courtrooms, on a charge of selling goods in the street, or for simply begging, or very likely named within some Workhouse record, but otherwise their names would never have been mentioned or thought worthy of mentioning. They are the ones who, by accident of birth, enter the world into a more lowly station in life, or have hit hard times, but in answering back, they give a face to all those invisible people, making the invisibility of poverty a little less so.

Make no mistake, there are some really distressing accounts of poverty, ill treatment, and the inevitable deaths as a result, which evoke feelings of compassion and sorrow for the extreme hardships that these people had to endure. However, it’s exceptionally well researched, making it not only informative, but completely fascinating. Highly recommended.

My thanks to Oskar Jensen, Duckworth publishing and Netgalley.
I often ask myself, why? Just why do I keep reading books like this? I suppose my answer is and must be to remember and never forget.
These people need to be remembered. What they've done, that seemed to have meant so little back in ages past, are really what most people of today live. Things are better.
I'm not religious at all, but I like to tell myself that there is a place for unfeeling people after they die. Hell? Nope. If I don't believe in heaven, then I don't believe in hell. I do believe in the soul though. I prefer to think that some souls just blink out! Do they? What the heck do I know?
Fantastic book.

"...I want to listen to...voices that have rarely been heard and taken seriously. These voices-which cried out their wares, services, wants or simply sang a song...belong to those who lived and worked in London's streets between the 1780s and 1870s...urchins and prostitutes, pickpockets and sweeps, beggars and ballad singers."
-Oskar Jensen

The streets of Victorian London. "While respectable London saw them as places to pass through, conduits for capital and traffic, the people in the street saw them as places to be...". Mary Ann Donovan, age 18, attempted to sell combs in London's financial district. Her travail resulted in a fine and fourteen day incarceration for "obstruction-by creating a crowd of comb-buyers...[Was] selling combs...a cover for immodest purposes?" "Undaunted and unbowed, she has her say..." though, to no avail.

"The mewling infant is an asset to the street supplicant." A thirteen year old girl is out "singing, begging, generally making a scene." Her eleven year old sister carries their infant brother. The child's cries reach a fever pitch. He is being stabbed repeatedly, in secret, with a large pin. This is working "in a way the words of the song...could never be...people are stopping...fumbling for pennies." The children's father had sent his children out begging to supplement his fondness for "spirits". "...no account of [street infants] was complete without an itemisation of rags, holes and bare feet...Rags were essential stage-dressing for charitable exchanges...".

Easter, 1824. "Shame is an important part of street life." Cotton-winding and help from the parish barely covers rent and bread. The mother gambles on the purchase of hot cross buns. The son recalls "Folk had laughed at me, had rejoiced when I wept, but only two persons had bought...[Mother and son] cannot bear to cry out wares...they are not street folk." Desperation...willing to do anything, the child is hired as an errand boy. "He's still in the streets, but it's gainful employment...practically respectable...A 14 hour day stretching into 17 hours...He returns home 'foot-sore and ready to faint from low diet and excessive toil'." At every turn, the Mendicity Society is dedicated to ending street begging. "Convinced of their moral superiority-as confirmed by their own wealth, comfort and learning...[they apply] the law neither impartial or professional...but...dispensed in an alarmingly arbitrary fashion."

"Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-century London" was written by British historian Oskar Jensen whose extensive research includes first-hand accounts, court proceedings and narratives written by some of the vagabonds who lived this squalid existence. One writes of the hotly contested boundary between work and begging. "His conscience eats at him especially when singing the same hymns in chapel [and on the street]...nothing seemed so recoiling to me as that any one should know what I did for my bread."

"Best of all is the life of the mind...[some] learned their letters quickly...[one child] finds his way to a much thumbed edition of David Copperfield, which he reads aloud to his illiterate parents...Dickens was a fairy musician to us, filling our minds with a sweeter strain than the constant cry of hunger." Unlike Dickens, who was not raised in poverty, the true voices of Victorian London come to light through the voices of the downtrodden as written in this exemplary tome penned by Oskar Jensen. Highly recommended.

Thank you Duckworth Books and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

“Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London,” by Oskar Jensen (ISBN: 9780715654392), publication date 2 Jun 2022, earns four stars.

One might be tempted to recall Dickens, et.al., when reading this book but then that would do this book an injustice for Dickens stayed on the surface whereas this author dives deep into the gritty, debilitating, and oppressive reality faced by those individuals who actually lived on the streets of Victorian England. These were real people; they had names.

His approach is to tell their stories by categorizing the vagabonds (or victims, as he also calls them) into “the seven ages of man,” i.e., infancy, young boyhood, adolescent girlhoods, newcomers, professionals, old age, etc. He uses their words, those of their observers, and others to paint as bleak a reality as can be imagined. Juxtaposed to their plight are those more fortunate citizens who range from preying on the street people—many of whom are children—to providing them genuine assistance.

In the end, the author is sympathetic, even admiring, of these vagabonds, who by force of circumstances create their own environment, society, and freedom while plying their trades in and around the streets of 19th Century England.

It is an evocative book, one that promotes great sympathy, but one that also takes the vagabonds who are one-dimensional literary characters to living, breathing, three dimensional human beings. In doing so, he reveals the worst and best of people, while admiring the pluckiness of those on the streets even as he deplores their conditions in which they live.

Thanks to the publisher, Duckworth Press, for granting this reviewer the opportunity to read this Advance Reader Copy (ARC), and thanks to NetGalley for helping to make that possible.

A fascinating & brilliant account of the poor in 19th century London as told through their eyes. Jensen uses Biographies, and interviews amongst other things to help them tell their stories.
He paints a rich picture of their lives, and how even in the worst of times these people have their dignity, something the charitied like Barnados and the Mendicity society seem to forget.
He paints a rich picture of the people that is utterly compelling and heartbreaking.
From little Arthur Turner aged 6 who nearly suffocates in a chimney while attempting to clean it, to Joseph Johnson, a black sailor from the Caribbean with a wooden leg who sings sea shanties with a ship on his head praising the British Empire while not able to receive a pension because of his colour.
This is a must for history lovers and genealogists alike